For all the lip service paid to Game of Thrones through the marketing, aesthetic, and tone of Final Fantasy XVI, there is very little DNA shared between the two at their respective cores. While the bevy of options to explore the lore entries written for the game are interesting reads, they are seldom needed to understand the events of the game’s world. Conflicts happen isolated from one another, ever following the protagonist and bending to the needs of his story. This is not a knock on the game’s story, but it is emblematic of the fact that it is exactly what the title claims. For better and for worse, the latest entry in the series that refuses to stagnate is much more Final Fantasy than its creators and online discourse would lead you to believe. While at several points the attempts to forge a new identity clash with the story’s tendency to err toward series tropes, the end product nonetheless succeeds in almost all of what it sets out to do. The fact is that one will be far more satisfied with this game by expecting a reaffirmation of what is a known love rather than a reinvention.
Despite all of this, the first half of this game will fool you into thinking that a reinvention is happening before your eyes. The story’s tight focus on the branded, magick, and the devastation wrought on the world by the mothercrystals is a sharp left turn for the series, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Much of the world is convincingly hostile toward Clive’s visible brand, and this is communicated expertly through the sidequests. While nothing mechanically interesting is ever asked of the player, many of them are successful in their goal to either endear or disgust. The hook of Clive’s initial journey, as it shifts from revenge to self-loathing to hero, is a path that follows naturally from the world he exists in. Cid (who is easily the series’ best version of the character) passes on to Clive one of the series’ most defining themes, and what identifies this game as Final Fantasy to its bones: that there is never enough suffering in the world to give up fighting for a better one. In the transition to Clive falling into this archetype though, the game’s narrative becomes strangely unfocused. Once five years are skipped over, the game plays catchup to try and please its many audiences. Suddenly it’s Jill’s time to get some (weak) depth to her character, and then there’s an invasion of the Crystalline Dominion (which so little information is given about that I was begging for Vivian to give a PowerPoint dedicated entirely to it), and then Barnabas finally awakens from his apparent slumber to have an epic faceoff against Clive. This all works for the second half of the game, as Ultima eventually drags the narrative firmly into JRPG territory, but it clashes harshly against the first half as the world becomes centered almost entirely around Clive and the other Dominants. This is not a slight against JRPGs as a genre. Much of the discussion around this game’s narrative and its use of the genre’s tropes have been emblematic of the continued blight (lol) that western games journalism has inflicted upon Japanese Game Discourse. The issue here is that on several levels, it feels like there was some assent to this bashing of the genre as “too weird” that this series was arguably subject to the most of any. In this way, the game is somewhat a victim of its own indecision—unwilling to fully commit to the western aesthetic that it clearly adapts or the tropes that its own series trailblazed.
This all seems very overtly negative for a game that I largely love the hell out of. The Eikon fights are a stroke of genius that come at the intersection of Shounen pathos, ludonarrative synergy, and genuine “next-gen-ness” on a level that this game broke the glass ceiling of. Each one ups the ante, making you question how the next one can possibly be better, achieving it before your eyes, and making you feel like a fool for ever believing that what you did 5 hours ago was the coolest thing that you had, up to that point, experienced. The only aspect that isn’t continually ratcheted up throughout the game is the music which, from the very first fight to the last, is excellent. In a series that has the most impossible expectations for music set for itself, Soken will knock your socks off and convince you that he is probably the best composer in the game right now. It’s his mastery over a litany of genres that rockets this soundtrack to the upper echelons of the series’ offerings. Motifs dance through these genres, making Titan’s theme a pulse-pounding J-Rock riff at one point that flows seamlessly into the triumphant chants that the game turns to for its flourishes. While they never becoming difficult in the slightest, these fights expertly communicate Clive’s growing mastery of his Ifrit form, as you go from a hulking and unwieldy kaiju to an elegant fire-dancer.
By no means am I an expert on action combat, but this game’s flavor of DMC-lite kept me satisfied for most of the experience. Continually getting new Eikons to overhaul your style of play injected a lot of life into a fundamentally simple affair. I’m sure an optimal mix of stagger meter burn and pure damage has been found already, but plugging in a new ability into your existing set and reaching a new level of efficiency was good fun. The only thing clawing at this fun is the enemy variety, which is the most puzzling thing about this game. The first half is exploding with unique enemy types. I was shocked to find that nearly every new area offered a unique set of enemies that, although way too passive, livened up encounters a great deal. However, once the second half rolls around, the developers seemed to be content with reusing old enemies to the point of inducing groans every time I saw another Large Man with an Axe. In a strange way, this turned the combat into an Opus Magnum/Factorio-like, where all my effort was being poured into figuring out the path of least resistance to the Enemies Defeated screen. If you are an action game head, you already knew this game’s combat wasn’t for you, but I think any player would benefit from going in with the expectation to simply enjoy the spectacle of it all.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this game is its characters. This is less so directed at the way they are written as a whole, but at the way they are utilized. The game’s insistence that, apart from Jill and Torgal (who doesn’t speak), Clive be nearly constantly alone, left me begging for more interactions with these people. The idea that being surrounded by trusted friends and allies will better you as a human being is a distinctly Final Fantasy one. One of this game’s core themes is that Clive cannot save the world by himself, and yet the game presents very few gameplay arguments against that. I’m not asking for a controllable party, or even a robust collection of party interactions, but a steady party at all would have sufficed. Byron was sorely needed as a mood lightener in many parts of the game that he is absent from. Every section of the game with Joshua left me wanting so much more of his unrepentant optimism. In many ways this conspicuous lack of Joshua throughout the second half made the ending hit me harder (read: when Joshua said “Thank you for being my brother” I sobbed uncontrollably), but I’m not sure that was intended in that specific aspect. Being relegated to Jill, whose character goes through the fraught states of “I need closure” to “I now have closure” with the subtlety and heart of a Persona 5 arc, is unacceptable for any game let alone a game in this series. For all the effort and soul that was clearly put into this game by everyone involved, I just wish it was more confident in itself. 16 is at its best when it’s leaning entirely into its own spin on the roots that it grew from: loving someone, experiencing a beautiful world, and saving it from a god because you felt that love viscerally, and you saw beauty first-hand.

If you’re anything like me, you will end Red Dead Redemption 2 with an album’s worth of screenshots taken. More than any other game, I routinely collected snapshots of moments that begged not to be forgotten. I found that, by the end of my journey with Arthur and John, playing Red Dead 2 is like looking through someone else’s photo album; as you find candid and imperfect shots of people and places you can never fully understand, you get a sense of what they might have been like if you had truly been there—you wonder what infinity of experiences took place to lead them to this perfect moment, and what lies just ahead.

Chapter 1: Arthur Morgan
It seems so strange that, in a game so prideful in its emphasis on player decision and personal morality, that its main character is required to do unambiguously immoral actions. Unlike John Marston in the original Red Dead Redemption, there is no promise of familial safety, or the guise of only killing the bad people propelling Arthur through his journey. Although one obviously has the option to kill many innocents in that game, there is always either the light of freedom or the overhanging cloud of the Pinkertons pushing John through his every action. No matter how many roadside beggars you decide to help as Arthur, you are frequently reminded that he is willing to be unforgivably cruel for the sake of Dutch. Every town that the Van der Linde Gang enters quickly falls into myriad chaos ranging from being converted into a warzone (Rhodes) to, in one of the most jawdroppingly cruel things in the game, going on a purposeless killing spree through Strawberry. Until the final chapter, this all seems to undermine Arthur Morgan when compared to what he is outside of these moments. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was always pulled into doing the right thing as Arthur. Despite the fact that he is, for most of the game, silently complicit with the gang’s murder romps, it felt violating to do the wrong thing as Arthur. From what I see across the internet, this is the impression that I see most people implicitly understanding. It’s the tenderness with which he arches forward to stroke his horse’s muzzle, the transparent and raw regret that he has for his lost love with Mary, or the uncharacteristically (and missable!) tender journal entries that he writes in response to myriad events, that Arthur constantly proves himself to be much more than a gun for hire. When chapter 6 finally rolls around, and the game reveals its hand to the player, what had seemed to be Rockstar’s routine inability to reconcile their gameplay loop and their writing transforms into a denouement that takes full advantage of those assumptions. You aren’t the only one who thinks Arthur is uncharacteristically brutal in light of his typical demeanor, because the world does too. It would have been easy for Rockstar to allow players the simple satisfaction of being forgiven by the beaten debtors ruined along the warpath, but there is no solace to be had; the game shuts you out, leaving only the personal knowledge that an effort was given toward being less of a monster to these people. My Arthur died a rich man, pockets lined with the spoils of many successful heists and required robberies. At least for me, there was never enough to spend it all on. I would have given everything to the wife of the indebted coal miner, or the veteran on the run due to his indigenous wife, or the boy who was unceremoniously robbed of his father for no good reason; I couldn’t do any of that. Arthur wasn’t given that kind of absolution, and there’s no reason he should have. Still though, it’s difficult to ignore the young boy behind the cattleman and revolver, looking to please the only man who hasn’t abandoned him yet. On his unsacred deathbed dying alone and betrayed, I didn’t see a monster in those sunken eyes. I couldn’t; I saw Arthur Morgan arching forward to pat his beloved horse one last time, confessing his fear of death to the nun at the station, giving and giving and giving everything to become anything other than alone in a world and a country and a time rapidly hurdling toward a way of life that is unbearably isolating. It’s a masterstroke of writing for an open world protagonist: a character in perpetual turmoil over what he wants to be versus what he inescapably is; the only way to learn the former is to stray from the beaten path, being a voyeur to what he’s like when nobody else is looking, dismounting under an oil-lit moon and providing company and comfort to the only people lonelier than he. It felt imperative to make sure these moments were saved. In a way, it was my proof that, for most of my time with him, Arthur Morgan was no monster.

Chapter 2: Disney Land
“Ugh my cores are getting low”
“Jesus christ why can’t I run in camp”
“They’re really making me ride from Saint Denis to Strawberry”
These don’t even begin to scratch the surface of the litany of little frustrations Red Dead 2 elicited from me. The game exists somewhere between traditional open world romp and pure simulation, letting you sidestep many of the simulation elements, but reminding you every step of the way that you are, in fact, ignoring them. Most of the time this is a minor inconvenience, but other times you will receive a bounty for accidentally hitting triangle near someone else’s horse because it looked close enough to your horse so now you have to ride to the post office and speed walk to the clerk so you can spend ten of your hard earned American dollars to ensure that the cops don’t open fire on you for mounting and immediately dismounting a random horse. This is, to put it lightly, annoying. This kind of situation is the exception, though. Most of the time, these little annoyances do something unexpected: they pull you in further. In reality, nothing that bad will happen if you let your cores run low or wear clothes that are inadequate for a specific weather condition. You might experience slightly more difficulty in combat, but combat is so trivial that it’s a drop in the bucket. What happened to me is, despite the fact that the simulation aspects of the game didn’t hold much concrete mechanical consequence, I took part in the cowboy life anyway. I drank whisky to keep my deadeye core up, not because it made combat meaningfully easier, but because it gave me more confidence going into a fight. I didn’t brush my horse because it decreased its health degradation (I am literally not sure if this one actually does anything or if the game made me afraid for nothing), but because I wanted my horse to love me. I didn’t want to be the odd man out of the stage-play, breaking character just to satisfy my impatience. This test of immersion resolve comes most powerfully in Red Dead 2’s traversal. No other big budget open world game from the 2010s is this stingy with its fast travel options. There are options that reveal themselves during the game, but many of your hours playing the game will be taken up by typically silent rides from one point to another. It’s reductive, though, to pretend like the majority of my trips in Red Dead 2 happened so linearly. Taking off from wherever the last mission dropped me off in the first hints of dawn, I would chart out for Saint Denis for the next box to check off my list. Halfway there, I would hear a hunter caught in a bear trap, or a woman recently robbed, and I would help them in the way I knew Arthur would. Then I’d see a white question mark appear on my map, and I would discover a woman from the city looking to learn how to hunt, or an amputee veteran who lost his horse. I would satisfy their desires, and on the way find myself in awe of the way the sunset perforated the cloud cover and illuminated the obscuring mist hanging over the swamp. There are very few tangible rewards in Red Dead 2, but the screenshots that I took at moments like these were adequate payment for the time I had taken on the unbeaten path. It’s not just that the game’s beauty is overwhelming in its close hewing to an America that seems unimaginable in its wayward majesty, but the way that it coincides with the themes and historical placement it presents.

Chapter 3: In Medias Res
Red Dead 2 presents itself as portraying the dying breaths of the Wild West, a time that, second to maybe the founding fathers and revolution, is the primary source of myth making for American history. Unlike the beginnings of the country, the period of Wild West has no tangible beginning. One can point to an event like the Louisiana Purchase as a time when European colonists began to explore uncharted lands west of the Mississippi, but that fails to explain the “wild” part of Wild West. The gunslingers robbing trains and the vast, lawless frontier that they rode upon is indicative of something more than what can be defined by a set period of history. It’s present in Dutch’s continual gambits toward finding a world where the gang can live out some stagnant simulation of what they once had. You can see it in the game’s journey eastward, as the player transitions from the freedom of New Hanover and Ambarino to the cramped claustrophobia of Saint Denis; the irony of Dutch’s quest being that he is constantly moving away from what he loves so dearly. Indeed, the Wild West is a microcosm of America’s conflict between its prescription of being a land of freedom from overbearing monarchy in Europe and the descriptive reality of robber barons and a new kind of king. Everything is readily available in Saint Denis, but it isn’t fun to exist in. You constantly find yourself bumping into civilians and other riders, receiving bounties for actions that would go overlooked in other towns. Thinking that I was going to help another distressed character, I got robbed for a significant amount of money in an alley, unable to get it back. It feels like a different game riding around the city, and you never truly feel welcomed there. There isn’t a place for people like Arthur Morgan in Saint Denis, but was there ever a place? Dutch’s gang, and the rival O’Driscolls, routinely feel like losers. They get away with petty crimes here and there, destabilizing settlements of a couple dozen people, but they are never formidable. Run out of Blackwater, the law seems to always think of them as an afterthought, sending two Pinkerton agents to deal with the entire gang. The truth of the Wild West is that it was never very wild at all, at least in the mythological frequency of duels and robberies and complete lawlessness. There was undoubtably a greater freedom due to one’s distance from civilization as they advanced westward, but industry and the order that it necessitates would not be very far behind. There is also the unceremonious exclusion of indigenous people from the freedom that is so widely touted by the Wild West myths. As you get to the tail end of the game, you can witness that it wasn’t the cowboys and swindlers that lost their way of life first, but the people who called that land home. The rebellion that Eagle Flies wages against the US government, and the end of the Van der Linde Gang, both happen in the shadow of Annesburg—A town that is representative of the inevitable expansion of eastern progress to the west. Half of the settlement is taken up by the coal mine, which is surrounded by a sudden onset of tree stumps and billowing smoke. With historical context, one knows that a tragic ending was always in store for Arthur and the gang, the indigenous tribes, and the freedom that they both sought, but the tragedy that Red Dead 2 really exemplifies is that true freedom from tyranny was never anything but a dream. One can only find fleeting gestures toward it in the snapshots taken of wild, uncolonized plains rolling into the horizon. When you can exist in this place for as long as you’d like, watching the distant mountain range meet with a star-perforated sky, you begin to feel like freedom is not only more than just a dream, but something truly attainable.

Epilogue
All signs so far point to Red Dead 2 being a crushingly bleak game. For every moment of beauty observed in the world, there is a reminder that none of it will go untainted in the future. It isn’t universally tragic, though, as John Marston’s epilogue injects some hope into the narrative. John, who is finally convinced into leaving his status as an outlaw due to Abigail’s threat of leaving forever, finds that living a domestic life on a ranch has given him some semblance of peace. Even with the knowledge that this peace won’t last for very long, the enjoyment of it is reflected in gameplay. John’s missions are some of the best in the game, matching the heights of Arthur’s wild rides on the run from whatever chaos he wrought with the complete opposite kind of experience. The game insists that you take your time building John’s house, healing his relationship with Abigail, and finally giving attention to Jack. Jack is different from everyone else who grew up near Dutch. He is a thoughtful boy who has yet to be jaded by a world that can only be disappointing to him. You find that he is some of the better company to have in the game and along with Abigail, Uncle, Charles, and Sadie, he represents the hope that a man like John can cling to in absence of the freedom he once yearned for. While there’s no hope for the America that Dutch idealized to exist, there’s a humble ranch house and a loving family to prove that peace can endure in a brutal world. It is unfortunate, then, that John is unable to allow Arthur’s killer to escape, which kicks off the events that lead to his own murder. However, until that day comes when Edgar Ross knocks on John Marston’s door, there is a sense of finality to the violence. You can take as much time as you’d like to exist in a place where you are loved unconditionally. Time cannot bring with it the progress that will eventually undo the peace you hold, and you can make believe that, for this is the composite of everything you hoped America would be.